Candace completed her Doctor of Pharmacy, May 2015, from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Candace is a Master’s student funded by the VA Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Robert "Alex" Becker, MS is a PhD candidate in biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University, advised by Colin Walsh, MD; Jessica Ancker, PhD, MPH; and Tom Reese, PharmD, PhD. His research focuses on improving the detection of preventable adverse events in anticoagulation therapy and exploring patient and provider perspectives on a shared decision-making tool designed to manage these risks.

Alex earned a BS in Biomedical Engineering with a certificate in Computational Science from the University of Cincinnati in April 2020. As an undergraduate, he gained diverse, hands-on experience through research and industry roles at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Zimmer Biomet, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. He earned an MS in Biomedical Informatics from Vanderbilt in 2023.

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Drew Wilimitis (he/him) received his Bachelor of Science in computational and applied math from the University of Chicago (June 2018). Drew was a Statistical Analyst working with Colin Walsh. He is a PhD student funded by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). 

Dr. Martin Were is Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vice Chair for Fair and Ethical Informatics in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. He completed a B.A. in Biochemistry at Harvard University, went on to attend Harvard Medical School, and completed internal medicine residency training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School. He undertook an NLM-sponsored Medical Informatics fellowship at Regenstrief Institute Inc., Indiana University and a Masters of Clinical Research between 2006-2008.

Dr. Were’s work is in global health informatics. He has developed, implemented and evaluated a range of digital health solutions for the global settings including mobile health applications for providers and patients, electronic health record systems, unique patient identification approaches, and computerized clinical decision support systems, among others. He currently has over 55 peer-reviewed publications and has received over 10 million USD in grant funding. Over the last decade, he has been primary mentor to over 30 post-graduate health informatics and internal medicine trainees. He is also a practicing clinician in Internal Medicine.

Dr. Were has served as the Chief Medical Information Officer for the Indiana University-Kenya program (AMPATH), was co-chair of the mHealth Alliance Evidence Working Group, and has been on the Board of Scientific Counselors at Lister Hill Center of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and on the World Health Organization’s mHealth Technical Advisory Group. He is the Founder and Project Lead of the mUzima mobile Health initiative, an mHealth solution deployed nationally in Kenya and currently also used in several additional countries. Dr. Were currently serves as the Education Working Group Chair for the Pan-African Health Informatics Association (HELINA).

Research Interests: Global health informatics, computerized decision support, mHealth, and capacity building in Health Informatics. Current research involves the breath of application and implementation of health information technologies in resource-limited settings.

See Dr. Were's recent publications below:

I am finishing an anesthesia residency at Mount Sinai Hospital where I will also complete a liver transplant anesthesia fellowship. I attended the Icahn School of Medicine for medical school and Washington University in St. Louis for a BA in chemistry. Outside of medicine, I worked briefly for an educational technology startup.

I enjoy learning new things, which recently include investing, baking bread, and chess.

I am interested in leveraging data science in anesthesiology research and improving provider workflows. My interest in informatics developed through a variety of research projects, which involved website and app design, data analysis, and database management. I’m looking forward to learning more about designing, implementing and maintaining informatics projects in healthcare settings.

I am a native to California. I attended Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California for my undergraduate studies and majored in biology and chemistry. I attended medical school at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Throughout my medical education, I did research on underserved populations with work published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine on the impact of funding instability on the teaching health center graduate medical education program. During my psychiatry rotations, I discovered my fascination with the human mind, the rewards of aiding patients in their recovery
from mental illness, and an appreciation for the legal side of psychiatry. For these reasons, I am now pursuing a psychiatry residency at University of California, Riverside.

As a psychiatrist, I have been privy to many of the ways
psychiatry has fallen behind other areas of medicine. One of these areas is the lack of utilization of information technology within healthcare. I desire to be part of the groundbreaking ways that psychiatry utilizes information and data from providers, thus improving healthcare for the mentally ill. Whether this is by incorporating electronic medical records within a hospital system or through the use of AI to improve outcomes, I have learned clinical informatics can be used as a catalyst between data and optimizing clinical care for those who
suffer from severe mental illness. I foresee clinical informatics becoming a vital aspect of every care delivery team. As clinical informatics continues to be ingrained within medical systems and healthcare delivery, I’m excited to be a part of this transition
and relish the career opportunities a master's degree in clinical informatics can provide.

I started out as a Health Systems Software engineer at
Vanderbilt Medical Center when Health IT was just a startup in
the basement of the Eskind Biomedical Library. After working in
the Bay Area for years, I gave myself 6‐months tops that I
wouldn’t survive working in the hospital basement. Then, almost
20 years later, I look back and realize that my interests in
technologies and healthcare grew as fast as my kids!

I have a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from India,
and I received my MBA degree from TSU. Over the years at
Vanderbilt, I have been involved in many projects as a developer
and as a manager. I find a natural convergence of health care
and information technology, and managing it is both interesting
and challenging. My past project working on computerized
prescriber order entry (CPOE) exemplifies just that, we were
tasked to deliver value‐based care using advanced technologies,
securely exchanging sensitive patient data, and even showcasing
a touch of artificial intelligence.

In the near future I look forward to working with digitized
healthcare data to help find systemic waste, identify people at
risk of chronic diseases, utilize technologies like cloud
computing, AI, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to
streamline health care delivery, and align it with changing
consumer preferences, and to do so fast (and furiously)! I would
love to do a project analyzing the rising costs of healthcare and
finding ways to tame it. A task that is complicated, but not
impossible.

I love hiking, skiing, travelling, losing debates to my kids, serving
at the pleasure of my wife, and joking.